Photo Essay: The Homes of Charles Dickens



Dickens' changing signature - a display in the Charles Dickens Museum
 at 48 Doughty Street in London

Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812; he died on 9 June 1870. During his life he lived in a lot of different homes – nearly all of which are no longer standing. But there are three key houses in England that the Dickens enthusiast should visit – as my friend Tony Grant and I did back in the summer of 2009. This photo essay (my photos throughout) provides a tour of each of those three houses.

Portsmouth – 393, Old Commercial Road

Old Commercial Road in Portsmouth - Dickens's Birthplace Museum near the end (on the left)

On this Dickens pilgrimage, why not start at the beginning? Go to Portsmouth, where his life began. It is miraculous, really, that the house still stands. Not only has it survived many extensive changes and redevelopments in the area; it even emerged unscathed from heavy World War Two bombing of the city – Portsmouth had been an important military port. But there it still is. It’s a fairly quick drive down there from London – about a hundred kilometres south-west of the capital on the south-coast of Hampshire. Or you could take the train down from Victoria Station.

Entrance of Dickens's Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth

When the small, terraced, brick house was built it was situated outside the city, in the suburb of Landport – a new suburb built in the 1790s. The area was known then as Mile End, or New Town. The original address had it located at No. 13, Mile End Terrace. Charles’s parents, John and Elizabeth Dickens, moved into the house during the summer of 1809. It was the first house the newly-married couple rented. Dickens’s father had moved down from London to work in the Portsmouth dockyard; he worked on the payroll accounts at the Navy Pay Office, earning an annual salary of £110. Charles’s eldest sister Frances (Fanny) was born there in 1810; and Charles, the second child, was born about two years later, on 7 February 1812. His father was twenty-seven; his mother was twenty-two. It was a Friday; and Friday became a day of omen for Charles Dickens – sometimes good, sometimes bad! His mother used to say that she went to a ball on the night before his birth, but this is now considered to be one of several apocryphal stories surrounding the great one’s early childhood. Three weeks after Charles’s birth, his parents took the infant to the church of St. Mary’s Kingston, where he was christened on 4 March as Charles John Huffam Dickens – Charles after a maternal grandfather, John for his father, and Huffam for a London friend of his father. Huffam was also chosen as godfather to the child.

View into back garden from the back room on the first-floor

The house at Mile End was a modest dwelling. It was set in a semi-rural neighbourhood. His parents could now consider themselves members of the middle class. The house eventually got swallowed up by the city. When you visit it today, you’ll find it in the Southsea district of Portsmouth. And the address has changed; it’s now located at No. 393, Old Commercial Road and hosts the Charles Dickens’s Birthplace Museum.

Period plates (Regency) on a period sideboard

It’s strange that, despite his intense nostalgia for his childhood years - he would write about it later in several of his novels - Dickens never had any sentimental interest in his birthplace. One time he wrote this about it: “I can’t say I usually care much about it.” In fact, he did try to make a visit here once with a friend. But he couldn’t find its exact location. No Google Maps back then!

Drawing Room in the ground-floor front

The house has a small garden in the front and the back. The building includes two storeys, a basement, and an attic. In the Dickens’s time, it had a kitchen and washroom in the basement, a dining room and parlour on the ground floor, two bedrooms on the first floor, and two small garret rooms at the top of the house. There was no running water for the entire terrace; each unit had an outhouse in the back garden.

Tony displays the old Museum sign stored in the garret

The bedroom in which Charles was born – the front room on the first floor – has two windows which look out over the small front garden. At the time, the house looked out over Cherry Garden Field – with Portsmouth Harbour visible off in the distance.

Bedroom on first floor front - Charles Dickens was born here (not the original bed, but it's a period piece)

The house was furnished in the sparse, pre-Victorian, Regency style: the wooden floors occasionally covered with area-rugs, and the rather plain rooms were illuminated by oil lamps or candles. There are no original Dickens possessions here from their time in the house, but the museum has set up three fully-furnished rooms – parlour, dining room, and front bedroom – with genuine Regency furniture and household items that they have collected over the years. They do have the adult Dickens’s snuff box, inkwell and paper-knife. More importantly, in the back room on the first floor, they have the couch from Gad’s Hill Place upon which Charles Dickens died. On the wall above the couch is a large, framed copy of his death certificate.

The couch that Dickens died on at Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester, Kent on 9 June, 1870

Charles Dickens collapsed in the dining room of Gad’s Hill Place on 8 June 1870. Only his sister-in-law, Georgina, was with him at the time. He fell unconscious to the floor at about 6 p.m. The local doctor was summoned. He had Dickens moved from the floor onto a couch, which had been carried down to the dining room from upstairs. He died on the couch at about 6.15 p.m. on 9 June 1870, twenty-four hours after he had collapsed.

Copy of Charles Dickens's Death Certificate

When Charles was five-months old, the Dickens family had to move to a smaller house on a poorer road called Hawk Street. They were already in financial difficulty. Eighteen months later their prospects improved somewhat, and they moved to a better residence at 39 Wish Street in Portsea. That winter John Dickens was summoned to work at Somerset House in London. They left Portsmouth, Dickens later recalled, in the midst of a snowfall – and never returned.

Looking towards the front door

The Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum is located in Portsmouth at 393 Old Commercial Road. It is open daily there (except Mondays) between mid-April and September from 10.00 – 5.30. Admission is £4 for adults, £3.50 for senior citizens, and £3 for children and students.
 

 

 

London – 48, Doughty Street

Charles Dickens had been renting a house at Furnival’s Inn in Holborn, central London from 1834-1837, when he decided it was time to find a larger place for his growing family. He and his wife Catherine had been married now just over a year. Dickens was so busy at the time that he hired house agents to find a house, while he and Mary Hogarth, his sister-in-law, also did some looking around, inspecting available premises.

Doughty Street (to the right) in Central London

The house at 48 Doughty Street was found fairly soon. He made an offer for the place on 18 March, 1837, agreeing to a three-year lease at a rent of £80 per annum. He got his publisher, Richard Bentley, to give him an advance of £100 to cover the various moving expenses. He and his family moved in two weeks later – 31 March 1837.

Outside the front of 48 Doughty Street where Dickens lived (1837-1839)

The house on Doughty Street was located in a row of terraced houses built in the late-1700s. It was a typical brick house of the late Georgian period, an attractive home located in a quiet, private road, with a gateway manned by a porter on each end, in order to keep out undesirables. The area, at the time, was on the fringes of respectable London. Just east of Doughty Street ran the rather squalid Gray’s Inn Road, along which cattle were driven towards the Smithfield Market. But then to the north and west lay the posh squares and terraces of the estates of the Foundling Hospital and the Duke of Bedford. This house was bigger and grander than anything he had ever lived in with his parents. To help run the household, he employed a cook, a housemaid, a nurse, and a manservant.

48 Doughty Street was a three-storey house with twelve rooms. It also included a basement, an attic, and a small garden at the back of the house. There was a dining room and a back parlour on the ground floor. Dickens’s study was on the first floor – at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Next to the study was the family’s drawing room, at the front of the building. On the second floor were two bedrooms.



Drawing Room at Doughty Street - Dickens always preferred
the Regency/William IV style to the early Victorian look

Dickens made changes to the house. He had the woodwork trim painted pink. A veined marble fireplace-hearth was installed in the drawing room. Bright-coloured carpets and rugs were added to many of the rooms. And he had a complete set of “standard novels” added to the shelves in the study. Dickens loved brightness in the family rooms; so he installed mirrors throughout the house. They reflected the light and improved the rather gloomy mood created by oil lamps and candles. Dickens continued to favour furniture and fittings of the Regency and William IV style. He preferred them to the rather drab style of the early and mid-Victorian period. Domestic order was very important to him. Before he could start work in his study each day, for example, he would tidy the room – making sure all the furniture and fittings were was set in their proper place.



The bed Mary Hogarth (his wife's younger sister) died in early May 1837

During his tenure at Doughty Street, Charles Dickens finished writing The Pickwick Papers; he also wrote in their entirety Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The move to Doughty Street was a mark of Dickens’s eminence now in the literary world. And he did much lavish entertaining in the house – many friends noted with astonishment the amount of effort and money he put into these dinner-parties and celebrations.



Hallway near the front door

The time spent at Doughty Street was a happy and prosperous period for the family, except for the dramatic death there of Mary Hogarth, the sister of Dickens’s wife Catherine. It happened only five weeks after they had moved in. The three of them had been out one evening to the St. James Theatre, to see a performance of the play Is She His Wife?, written by Charles. When they got home and were preparing for bed, Mary collapsed. She never recovered, dying in Dickens’s arms the next afternoon. She was only 17 years old. Dickens was devastated and his grief lasted for many months.

Eventually, Doughty Street also became too small for the growing family – by the end of 1839, they had three children. Dickens found a new place within a week of beginning his search – it was a large house at 1, Devonshire Terrace, just south of Regent’s Park. They moved there in December, 1839.




My friend, Tony Grant, signs the Visitor's Book in the basement library, which houses the museum's extensive collection of original Dickens publications (books and magazines)

The Dickens Fellowship – founded in 1902 – decided to acquire 48 Doughty Street, in order to establish a museum to the great writer. Through the efforts primarily of the Fellowship’s founder, B. W. Matz, they launched a fundraising campaign in 1923 to raise the £10,000 needed to buy and endow the building. The Lord Mayor joined the campaign and called upon Londoners to help “preserve one of the most valuable literary relics of our time.” The Charles Dickens Museum was opened in the house on 9 June 1925.




The opening of the Museum at Doughty Street on 9 June, 1925

The Charles Dickens Museum contains the world’s most important collection of paintings, manuscripts, rare editions, original furniture and other items relating to his life and work. Perhaps the best-known article on display is the painting “Dickens’ Dream” by R. W. Buss. After almost a year-long renovation and refurbishment of the building at 48 Doughty Street, the Museum will reopen on 10 December 2012. Admission to the museum: £8 for adults; £4 for children 6-16 years; and Free for children under 6 yrs.



The museum owns the original painting (unfinished) "Dickens' Dream" by R.W. Buss

Higham, Kent (near Rochester) – Gad’s Hill Place

After about a year working in London (1816), when Dickens was a four-year old lad, his father was posted out to the north coast of Kent in early 1817 – first to Sheerness (in January), then to Chatham (in April), and finally to Rochester, where they lived on Ordnance Terrace for four years. When he was living there, a very young Charles Dickens often walked up the hill from Rochester on the Rochester-Gravesend Road that led towards London. It was a favourite hike of his. At the top of the hill, in the village of Higham, was a large house known as Gad’s Hill Place. Whenever he was passing the place with walking companions, he would invariably reminisce with them about the time when his father had first pointed out the house to him. “I used to look at it as a wonderful mansion (which God knows it is not) when I was a very odd little child,” he wrote; “I can recollect my father, seeing me so fond of it, had often said to me, ‘If you were to be persevering and were to work hard, you might someday come to live in it’.” And he did; he bought the house 36 years later.



Gad's Hill Place, near Rochester in Kent, where Dickens lived for his last 15 years (1855-1870)

At the beginning of February 1855 – as I wrote in my recent review of Little Dorrit – Dickens heard that Gad’s Hill Place was up for sale. He was interested, but before he could follow up on that interest, he was distracted for a while by a brief interlude with a former teenage love of his, Maria Beadnell. Much later in the year – in November – Dickens decided to buy the house. He paid £1,790 for it. He thought of it at first as an investment; he planned to rent it out, and to continue living in London in Tavistock House. He also toyed with the idea of using Gad’s Hill Place as a summer residence – living there with the family for a few months in the middle of each year, renting it out for the rest.



Antique post box next to Gad's Hill Place

Dickens called Gad’s Hill Place “old-fashioned, plain and comfortable.” It wasn’t at all grand, and not even that large. Tavistock House was more impressive. It was important to him more for what it meant – a symbol of the social position and financial success he yearned for during his problematic childhood. It was a three-storey, red-brick house built in the Queen Anne period. There was a bell-turret on top of the roof. From that roof, it was possible to see north as far as the River Thames; to the south and east, you could see Rochester and the valley of the Medway; and to the north-east you could look out over the flat and bleak coastal marshes. Outside the house there was a large, wooden porch complete with seats and pillars.

The rooms inside Gad Hill’s Place were relatively small. On the ground floor there was a drawing room, a dining room, a study, and a billiards room. The study was changed a couple of times – eventually it was located to the right side of the entrance hall, where he could gaze out of the windows into the garden. The first floor featured Dickens’s bedroom – its windows looked out towards the village of Strood.



The horse-drawn pump that brought up Dickens' water from the bottom of a 217-feet deep well. Moved later to Rochester - it's in the garden behind Eastgate House (near the Swiss chalet).

It took Dickens quite a while to get used to the quiet of this rural house. In fact, in the early days, it quite unnerved him. And then several major problems with the house emerged – particularly with the water supply and the drainage. The water supply was insufficient to satisfy the needs of the family – after a long process of trial-and-error, it was decided that a large pump would have to be built on the premises. A large team of workers was hired, and they began boring holes in the garden, digging up various flowerbeds in order to lay new pipes, and building new cesspools beneath the garden lawns. They had to dig down 217 feet in order to reach a sufficient supply of spring water, which had to be pumped up daily by a mechanism driven, literally, by horse-power! Dickens spent a lavish £200 on all this work.



The Swiss chalet  given as a Christmas gift to Dickens by Charles Fechter in 1864

For the Christmas of 1864, Dickens’s friend Charles Fechter – an actor first in France, and then in London – bought him a genuine Swiss Chalet. It had been disassembled and shipped to Gad’s Hill Place in 94 pieces, packed into 58 large boxes. Dickens attempted to begin work assembling the structure, with help from Fechter, family members, and several visiting friends. Finally, Fechter had his carpenter come down to Kent from London, to take charge of the project. It was much bigger than anyone had anticipated – a real chalet with two floors. Dickens decided to erect it on a piece of land he owned across from Gad’s Hill Place – on the other side of the Rochester High Road, that ran past his property.

The tunnel dug under the road;
it led to Dickens's Swiss chalet.

Eventually, Dickens had a small tunnel excavated under the road, so that he could get from his house to the chalet without being disturbed by curious onlookers. The chalet became his writing study during the spring and summer months from 1865 until his death in 1870. He liked how bright it was – and he increased that brightness by installing a bank of mirrors along one wall of the chalet’s upper room. After his death, the chalet was given to Lord Darnley and kept in Cobham Park.

Dickens’s Swiss chalet is now crammed into the gardens of Eastgate House, just off the old High Street in Rochester. The Rochester and Chatham branch of the Dickens Fellowship (founded in 1903) has mounted a campaign to raise £100,000 to preserve the chalet. There are large numbers of the wooden boards that are rotting away, and the chalet can no longer be safely entered. It has been determined that the chalet will need to be carefully dismantled and every single board will have to be carefully examined and, if necessary, replaced. Then the entire structure will require treatment to protect it against future rot. The current brick footings will have to be replaced, in order to provide the chalet a more solid foundation.





Tony beside the school sign for the Gad's Hill School (located partly in Gad's Hill Place)

After Dickens’s death in 1870, his oldest child, Charley, bought Gad’s Hill Place for £8,600, but he was forced to give it up in 1879 because of ill-health. In 1924 the house became the home of Gad’s Hill School. The headmaster of the school announced a few years ago that they planned to construct a new building for the school and to turn Gad’s Hill Place into a Dickens museum.



Dickens seated at his desk in the study at Gad's Hill Place - engraving by Samuel Hollyer (ca. 1875)

Resources used: Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) by Claire Tomalin; Dickens (1990) by Peter Ackroyd

Book Review: Charles Dickens 12 - "Little Dorrit"



Dickens portrait by Ary Scheffer (Nov. 1855)

Despite all of the success and adulation he continued to receive for his literary work and his public activities, and despite the personal satisfaction he got from his artistic growth as an increasingly serious novelist, Charles Dickens at this time was not a happy man. Something fundamental was gnawing at his gut. He felt trapped by his past – caught in a troubling vision of his life that kept coming back to haunt him. And he was growing ever more dissatisfied with his domestic situation – unhappy with his wife and bothered by constant problems with his children and his siblings.

Dickens had finished Hard Times in August, 1854. He took a year off before getting started on his next novel. During that year-long hiatus from serious writing, he continued with the same kinds of activities that he’d been involved with for the last few years: producing his weekly magazine, Household Words, planning amateur theatricals involving family and friends, doing public readings for charity, and making regular trips back-and-forth to France.

Dickens was back in England in December, 1854, from a holiday in France, in order to prepare for his second round of Christmas-time public readings, undertaken again to benefit several charities that he supported. The use of privately-organised foundations and institutions to support charitable enterprises was very important during the Victorian era, and most public figures engaged in activities designed to help the poor and disadvantaged. Dickens had inaugurated public readings from his books during the Christmas season of the previous year – and that first experience had been a resounding success. On December 19 of this year he did a performance in Reading for the Literary, Scientific and Mechanics Institution; two days later he was in Sherborne on behalf of the Literary Institute there; and, just after Christmas, he was up north in Bradford for the Temperance Educational Institution, doing a reading in front of 3,700 people at St. George’s Hall. Since these were all done during Christmas time, Dickens used A Christmas Carol for all three readings.

One innovation of this season’s readings was an invitation to the audience from Dickens to respond freely to his work – whether with tears of sorrow, or shouts of laughter. They should not feel inhibited by the formal situation, he told them. The audiences would erupt into applause when he made this announcement. And they certainly took him at his word, much to Dickens’s delight – he loved the immediacy of the feedback, and the readings became more dramatic and theatrical as time went on.



The brothers - William and Frederick Dorrit in the Marshalsea Prison yard

Also during December, Dickens was busy organising the annual Twelfth Night play for his family at their London home, Tavistock House. This year he produced a version of Fortunio and his Seven Gifted Servants a fairy-tale play written in 1843 by J. R. Planché. His friend, writer Wilkie Collins, participated as an actor in the performance. More amateur theatricals came in May, 1855. Dickens had just begun work on the first chapter of the new novel, but it wasn’t going well. He abruptly postponed further work on the book and threw his full effort into a new theatrical production – a sentimental melodrama written by his close-friend Wilkie Collins called The Lighthouse. Among the cast were some of his loyal accomplices: the playwright Mark Lemon, the artist Augustus Egg, and the play’s author, Wilkie Collins.

In the New Year of 1855, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne visited England. He made note of the current critical opinions of Dickens that he read in the press. The general public may still have adored him – especially his lower-class and middle-class readers – but he was not to the taste of the literati. They generally preferred William Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair (1848). Blackwood’s Magazine pointed out sniffily that “it is the air and breath of middle-class respectability which fills the books of Mr. Dickens.” And the novelist Anthony Trollope – only three years younger than Dickens, but very early into his own writing career, at this time – dubbed him “Mr. Popular Sentiment”.

At the beginning of February, Dickens noticed that Gad’s Hill Place was for sale. This was the house that his father, John Dickens, had pointed out to Charles, when he was still a small boy. They had walked by the place together when the Dickens family were living nearby (close to Rochester). Dickens’s father had told Charles that it was the sort of reward that might come to a man of success. He had passed the place often during walks between Rochester and London – and always remembered what his father had said. He remarked to his colleague W. H. Wills – his editorial assistant on Household Words – that “the spot and the very house are literally ‘a dream of my childhood’.” He made some enquiries. It wasn’t actually a particularly impressive house – nowhere near as grand, for example, as his current London home at Tavistock House. It was what it stood for that fired his imagination. He made plans to visit and examine the house just three days after his initial enquiry.

Dickens's love in his late-teens, Maria Beadnell

But he got side-tracked from that plan by another dramatic memory of his past. Out of the blue he received a letter from Maria Beadnell – the young woman he had courted back in his late teens, when he was working as a parliamentary reporter. He had been infatuated by her, but she eventually rejected him. Dickens had been deeply humiliated by the rebuff – he thought it was caused primarily by his lack of social position. Maria’s letter was a message of fond reminiscence to her former suitor – now a famous author. Dickens was surprised – and strangely moved – by this unexpected communication. He described his response as a “softened emotion” caused by thoughts of his ardent youth – and a realisation that the wound she had caused him was now buried deep in the past. The more he thought about her, the more impassioned he became. He exchanged a couple of discreet messages with her from London. But soon he was back in Paris again, and from there he sent her a series of lengthier, and more intense, messages. It seems evident, in hindsight, that Dickens behaviour was driven by a deep unhappiness, an intense dissatisfaction with his wife Catherine. He arranged a clandestine meeting with Maria. As soon as they met, after so many years without seeing each other, all his romantic longing evaporated. The youthful beauty of Dickens’s memory was long gone. As Georgina, Dickens’s sister-in-law, bluntly put it later, “She had become very fat and quite commonplace.” As often happened with Dickens, the reality did not match his imaginative vision. He broke off contact with Maria as quickly as he could decently manage it. But only a few months later, Dickens revisited this disappointing experience by introducing a character into his new novel based on Maria Beadnell. Her name was Flora Finching; and she is depicted as an affected, loquacious, sentimental fool. Recalling his own disappointment, Dickens describes the very first encounter that his middle-aged protagonist, Arthur Clennam, has – after twenty-odd years – with  his former sweetheart, Flora: “Clennam’s eyes no sooner fell upon the subject of his old passion, than it shivered and broke to pieces.” Although he softens the portrait of Flora (Maria) later in the book, it is clear that the shock he felt about the discrepancy between his imagination and the reality pushed him to respond cruelly. He must have known she would read his latest book – especially after their recent rendezvous; but as was often the case with him, he only really cared about his own attitudes and needs. Given that, however, Dickens does make her one of the few positive characters in the book, and the reader cannot help delighting in many of her astonishing monologues.



Gad's Hill Place near Rochester (a photo of mine from a visit in 2009)


Later that year, in November 1855, Dickens decided to buy Gad’s Hill Place. He had finally seen it in detail a few months before. He paid £1,790 for it – paying by check on a Friday (his lucky day, he said). He thought of it initially as an investment – he planned to continue living in Tavistock House in London – and intended to rent it out.

Dickens had begun Little Dorrit in May, but when he found the going difficult, he put the work aside to concentrate on amateur theatricals. His friend and confidant, John Forster, thought that Dickens was experiencing “a drop in invention”; but the key problem, as usual, was finding a leading theme for the novel – what he called a “guiding idea”. And then he had it: a group of travellers would meet in the port of Marseilles, France; they are held in quarantine there for some time, and then move on to pursue their own lives. The story would show future connections amongst the travellers. Some of them are soon back in London. One of them meets Amy Dorrit, ‘Little Dorrit’, and discovers that she and her family live in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison.

But Dickens was still not sure exactly where this story was going. It certainly wasn’t as carefully planned out and structured as some of his more recent works. The second number of the serialised novel took him three months to complete. His work was interrupted further by his sitting for portraits by Paris-based artist Ary Scheffer and his brother Henri. [Ary’s portrait is featured at the beginning of this review]. Dickens sat for these portraits simultaneously during November. He found the whole process very tedious, and to top it off, as he wrote to John Forster, “I do not discern the slightest resemblance, either in his portrait [Ary’s] or his brother’s”. Finally, at the beginning of December, the first monthly issue of Little Dorrit was published. His publishers, Bradbury and Evans, mounted a big publicity campaign: they put up 4,000 posters around the city; and they printed an incredible 300,000 handbills! Dickens described the response to the first instalment as “a brilliant triumph”. The print run was increased for the next issue to 35,000 copies.



Wrapper of first instalment (Dec. 1855)

Little Dorrit was published, as usual, in nineteen monthly instalments (the last being a double-issue, sections XIX and XX) between December, 1855 and June, 1857. It was divided into two Books – “Poverty” and “Riches”. It was a neat division: the first half dealt with the Dorrits’ life cooped up in the Marshalsea Prison; the second followed their exploits after being release from the prison. This was Dickens’s fifth novel published by Bradbury and Evans – he had been with them now for just over a decade. The new book was illustrated, as usual, by Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’). Each issue was priced at a shilling – except for the last, which, as a double issue, cost two shillings.

As was often the case with Dickens, certain topical events were picked up and used in his new novel. The satirical chapters aimed at government bureaucracy (the ‘Circumlocution Office’ represents HM Treasury) reflected his disgust with the appalling incompetence with which the government was running the Crimean War. Thousands of soldiers were dying of disease and malnutrition because of the lack of supplies, the lack of medical facilities, and the lack of clothing that could protect the troops from the extreme cold. He saw this calamity as another example of the failure of the system – exposing again the callous stupidity of the political aristocracy running the country. He hated Parliament; it was a glaring emblem of the current failure of representative government. Another contemporary event that caught his imagination was a dramatic bankruptcy that rocked the financial system in London. A prominent financier – John Sadleir – committed suicide near Jack Straw’s Tavern on Hampstead Heath, after a long series of financial improprieties. For Dickens, this incident was further proof of the corruption of the entire financial system. He introduced this theme into Little Dorrit in the figure of Mr. Merdle, a popular and socially-prominent financier, who – it turns out – is running a type of Ponzi-scheme.

Dickens’s constant trips back-and-forth to France (usually Paris and Boulogne) indicate his growing disenchantment with London. It was no longer his city. He would soon move permanently to Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. He noticed the physical ugliness of the city more and more. And he felt oppressed by the corruption he sensed at all levels of its society. Little Dorrit is a sustained attack against the current state of English society – its government, its legal system, its bureaucracy, its financial system, and its aristocracy. Dickens also seemed to be avoiding London because of a growing dissatisfaction with his wife Catherine. In May, 1856, for example, when he came back to England from yet another visit to France, he stayed for four days at the Ship Inn in Dover, rather than return immediately to the family home at Tavistock House. His wife’s family (the Hogarths) were staying there and he just didn’t want to deal with them. And in many ways it was Catherine’s sister, Georgina – who had come to live with the Dickens tribe in 1841 as a fifteen year-old, in order to help raise the children – who now ran the household, because of her sister’s physical frailty and diffident attitude.

Looking north at the original wall of the Marshalsea Prison (my photo from a 2012 visit)

The key symbol and dominant theme of Little Dorrit is the prison. The book’s opening chapter is set in a prison in Marseilles, with two characters (one French, one Italian) who quickly drop out of the story, only to return later on. Also in Marseilles are a group of travellers being held in quarantine. And, then, back in London we meet the Dorrit family, who have been living for twenty-odd years in the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. Some characters are physically incarcerated. But there are many more characters in this book who have imprisoned themselves: they are constrained materially; they are trapped psychologically; they are restrained emotionally. They are invariably caught in a web of their own making.

And this theme of imprisonment surely reflects Dickens’s own life. He felt trapped in an increasingly unhappy marriage, and trapped in a life dominated by a whole host of family and professional obligations. He was also helplessly trapped in thoughts of the past – prompted especially by Maria Beadnell and Gad’s Hill Place. But were these memories a form of escape, or another kind of mental constraint? Two versions of the situation Dickens found himself in can be seen in the two innocent protagonists of the novel – Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam. Arthur is an unhappy middle-aged gentleman who feels that his life is already pretty much over. His emotional-life has been severely scarred by an unhappy childhood that was dominated by a cruel mother. He is a good man, but trapped by emotional constraint – still influenced by his mother’s tyrannical Calvinism. Arthur Clennam is something new in a Dickensian protagonist. Dickens’s ‘heroes’ are usually rather insipid ciphers; but Clennam is a more complicated man. He is self-critical and reflective – someone who has been buffeted by life, and who knows it. It’s hard not to see that this is Dickens pondering his own disappointments. And Clennam is the dominant point-of-view for the novel’s narrative arc. Amy Dorrit is also an innocent character. She may be imprisoned physically in the Marshalsea, but she is seemingly free of psychological and emotional damage. She represents a kind of perfect Christian religiosity – untouched by the degradation and corruption around her. If Arthur Clennam suggests Dickens’s own current, middle-aged plight, then Little Dorrit represents another ideal version of Dickens’s ‘innocent’ childhood. But, of course, he, unlike Amy, was deeply affected – fatally warped – by his brush with the debtors’ prison.

Northern wall of the Marshalsea  - all that's left of the entire prison (my photo from a visit in 2012)

At the time Dickens was writing Little Dorrit, the Marshalsea Prison had not been in operation for some thirteen years. It was closed in 1842 – all of the inmates were moved to other locations on November 19. Curiously, Dickens did not visit the site of the prison, located on the south side of the Thames in Southwark, whilst he was writing about it. He preferred to rely on his memories and his imagination. But just before the long novel was finished, he made a trip to the place on 5 May, 1857. In the Preface to the 1868 edition of the book, Dickens recalled that visit:

Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I myself did not know, until I was approaching the end of this story, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and then I almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent "Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey," I came to "Marshalsea Place": the houses in which I recognized, not only as the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's eye when I become Little Dorrit's biographer ... .

It’s instructive to consider William Dorrit, Little Dorrit’s father, another fictional portrait of John Dickens, Charles’s father. Charles had already created a fictional version of his father with Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield. Micawber had been a delightful, loquacious, good-natured character – who, despite his continuously improvident ways, was defiant and optimistic in the face of his troubles. William Dorrit – the Father of the Marshalsea (thanks merely to his seniority in the place) – is a much less likeable and positive character. He is a dithering, obsequious man. He is anxious to uphold the dignity of his family, but when they attain their freedom, he becomes a snob and a spendthrift. In Amy’s relationship with her father, we have yet another Dickensian instance of a sweet, innocent daughter sacrificing herself on behalf of an ineffectual and emotionally-exploitative father, or grandfather.



Mrs. Clennam, Flintwich and Arthur Clennam

Little Dorrit is the second of Dickens’s late-career London trilogy. It is his so-called ‘dark period’, when his novelistic art turns away from the exuberant comedy of his earlier work and takes on a sadder, rather cynical hue. These three books are set in a capital that is not only physical ugly, but also rife with moral and institutional corruption. His earlier books were a lot more fun. He would revel in the grotesqueries and absurdities of his exaggerated characters, and usually end his novels with a sense of benign conciliation. Not any more. His later novels are much more structurally sound. They show a better connectedness between the characters and the plot. The humour is less playful now; it often has a sharp, satirical bite. Not many happily-ever-afters here, despite the obligatory wedding involving the two protagonists.

Dickens was a sad and troubled man. He was unleashing much of his anger and hatred with the way things were in this novel. Little Dorrit is full of negative figures that he depicts in a harsh and straightforward way. Many of the characters are pretentious snobs. Most of them are imprisoned by their class prejudices and their yearning to climb the social ladder. They lack an honest response to life – everything is contrived, everything is a scheme. In one heart-rending scene, William Dorrit even lectures his blameless and upright daughter, Amy, about her social inadequacy. She is the one family-member who has remained unsullied, loyal, and upright. Her father is now a horrible snob, living off money he never earned. He tells her that she needs to develop a “surface”; she needs to assume a persona, a front, a mask. She needs, he says, to develop a sense of pride that is commensurate with the family’s wealth and rank. She accepts the rebuke without a word.



Blandois and Cavalletto in Marseilles prison

There are things in this novel that don’t work. The character of Blandois (aka Rigaud, aka Lagnier) is a smooth-talking scoundrel – but there is too much of the melodramatic villain in him – the devil incarnate – to  make him credible. The premonitions and ominous dreams of Affery Flintwich, who works as maid in Mrs. Clennam’s house, are also rather over-the-top. Miss Wade, on the other hand, is a more interesting case. She has a cold-hearted indifference that grates – when it’s laid on thick it reminds us of the over-drawn drama of Edith Dombey. But her championing of the disaffected maid Harriet Beadle (‘Tattycoram’) implies a lesbian relationship, although Dickens doesn’t depict it as such. And what do we make of Mr. Meagles? He is a retired banker, full of Pickwick-like benevolence. But there is something too patronising about him, and his attitude doesn’t ring quite true.

But it is the character of Little Dorrit that raises the most questions. In some ways, she can be dismissed as a typically exaggerated Dickensian heroine – too sweet, too insipid, too unbelievable. And most modern readers would see her like that – a highly unreal figure. But, as Irving Howe argues in his introduction to the Everyman Library edition of the novel, Dickens is after something more than a realistic character. What Dickens is up to, he says, is to portray a figure of “perfect goodness”. He almost achieved that before in his portrait of Samuel Pickwick. But that was a more benign world. The world of Little Dorrit is full of pretense, deceit and corruption. Amy Dorrit, by contrast, is mild and selfless. Instead of seeing her as innocent because she is inexperienced, and sentimental because she lacks grit, see her as simply good. Her goodness, Howe suggests, is a state of being. And, as such, it is presented to the reader as a tremendous contrast to nearly everyone around her. She is an adult, but she seems so childlike. She is the ultimate Christian example of goodness, because there is no dogma, no institutional affiliation, no formulaic ethic. She is good by virtue of her love and compassion. And she stands alone - there is no appeasement between her and the world around her. So how do we react to a person like that?

The monthly issues of Little Dorrit continued to sell well throughout its run. By the end it was selling close to 30,000 copies. But the reaction of critics was not generally kind. It was treated pretty much as a failure – another step in the author’s sad decline. Some of the negative response was the result of irritation with Dickens’s politics; some of it was the typical phenomenon of knocking an idol off his perch; and some of it was sheer snobbishness – the literati still objecting to this hero of the middle and lower classes. Blackwood’s Magazine succinct review called it “twaddle”. Nothing new, then; Dickens’s later work was invariably given a cool reception.

Not from me, though! Little Dorrit is a fascinating read. This was my first time with the novel – as was my recent exposure to Bleak House. Despite the critical acclaim accorded to the latter book (many consider it Dickens’s best), I much preferred Little Dorrit. It’s more of a page-turner. The themes are more relevant. The writing is less complex and arch. And the protagonists are more interesting and gripping. I got the sense that Dickens, himself, was more fully involved with this story. He was working through some complex emotions – using his incredible imaginative power to deal with deeply difficult problems in his private life. Trying to escape the prison that continued to hold him.



Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit get married



[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Dickens was to start again, read through all of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. So this is the twelfth of a series.]

Next: A Tale of Two Cities

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Little Dorrit by Irving Howe (1992); "Introduction" to Little Dorrit by G. K. Chesterton (1907); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]